I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini
reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one
needs to get hurt.
Hellraiser (1987-
dir. Clive Barker) **
The premise of Clive Barker's adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, is appropriately skeletal. Some dickhead stumbles into hell, and manages to escape and return to corporeal form by slaughtering the assholes his sister-in-law/sex monkey lures to him using her feminine wiles. Unfortunately, a band of mutant hell monsters miss torturing him so much that they go searching for him in the earthly realm. With its bad acting, leaden dialogue, and over-the-top gore, Hellraiser plays like a pre-teen goth's attempt to freak out his parents. Ooooh! Extreme!
Phenomena is
totally nutso, even by Dario Argento standards. Jennifer Connelly is a Swiss
boarding school student with the uncanny ability to communicate with insects,
and she uses this knack to solve a series of murders. Phenomena also has plenty of outrageous Argento gore, a droning soundtrack
by Bill Wyman, a score of completely ridiculous heavy metal songs, and a
knife-wielding monkey. I highly recommend you check out the DVD. A bonus
feature is a video for one of Wyman’s pieces of “music” from the soundtrack,
which features Wyman plugging his bass into his amplifier in ultra-slow motion.
After what feels like six hours of him inching his guitar chord toward his
bass, he gives his face a bath in a bedpan full of blood. Now that’s
scary!
October 27
The Manson Family (2003-
dir. ) ***½
The
Manson Family is
more horrific than
any fictional horror movie you’re likely to see. This was a sort of labor of
love for writer/director/egomaniac Jim Van Bebber, who began work in 1988
and didn’t complete it until it was to premiere at a European horror festival
in 2003. The idea that the actors had to keep returning to this gritty, grisly,
claustrophobic world for over a decade sounds a lot like torture to me. Van
Bebber does an incredible job of recreating the grainy look of seventies grind
house horror films, right down to the phony blood. Interestingly, and
thankfully, the
one instance in which Van Bebber decided to show a little restraint was the
depiction of Sharon Tate’s murder. The movie’s one very significant flaw
is an utterly
superfluous parallel story about some contemporary punks who commit some
Manson-inspired murders of their own.
Videodrome (1983-
dir. David Cronenberg) **½
“Long live the new flesh!” Oh, brother. This nonsensical
meditation on technology and sex has a huge cult following, but Videodrome is unbearably pretentious
stuff from body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. I can think of nothing more
eighties than the tacky image of James Wood inserting a VHS cassette into a
flesh VCR that appears in his torso. I bet it had a couple of episodes of “The
A-Team” he taped off TV on it. Half a star for Debbie Harry, because she’s cool
even when performing in this rubbish.
October 28
Bad Taste (1987- dir.
Peter Jackson) **½
Bad Taste has all
the hallmarks of a student film: amateurish acting, a soggy script (some
business about bozos battling people-eating aliens), dumb dialogue, bad sound,
and cheap special effects. Of course, this is a student film by Peter Jackson,
so it also shows some of the hallmarks of the future cult sensation and
blockbuster builder. The gore that defined Jackson’s early work plops all over
the screen. More impressively, his audacious, roaming camerawork is already
instantly identifiable. Bad Taste is
a bad movie by a great filmmaker, and Jackson would tighten up its ingredients
considerably for his next major feature, Braindead.
Saw (2004- dir. James
Wan) *
Shit sandwich.
October 29
The Tell-Tale Heart (1960-
dir. Ernest Morris) ***½
You have to hang a lot of extra material on Poe’s most
famous tale to bring it up to feature length. Screenwriter Brian Clemens
(director of Captain Kronos, as you
may recall) solves this problem by eliminating the old man with the weird eye
and making the main character (whom Clemens rather obviously names “Edgar”) a Norman
Bates-type peeping tom with his eyes on Adrienne Corri. It is through such
weird behavior that Clemens and director Ernest Morris establish the psychology
that will lead to the madness and murderousness that gets this film rolling
after a slooooooooow start. Even
after that, there’s a lot of repetitious action. Do we really need to see every single object in Edgar’s house
rocking in time with the beating heart? The filmmaking is handsome, but it
doesn’t shy from the lurid side of horror, particularly when it comes to the
hideousness of the hideous heart. As a schlocky bonus, The Tell-Tale Heart kicks off with a William Castle-esque gimmick
(when you hear the timpani go “boom, boom, boom,” hide your eyes if you can’t
handle the horror!!!). This is a good film that could have been excellent with
a much quicker heartbeat.
October 30
The Pit and the
Pendulum (1961- dir. Roger Corman) ****½
The Pit and the
Pendulum tends to take second place to Masque
of the Red Death and House of Usher
in assessments of Roger Corman’s Poe pictures, but Pendulum is nearly as good as Masque
and better than Usher. Corman fleshes
out one of Poe’s most teasingly slim mood pieces for a fully fleshed tale of
madness, childhood trauma, and haunting memories. The pendulum actually doesn’t
get much screen time, and I’ve always thought it was too small. Those barely
qualify as complaints because there’s so much else in this film to sink your blade
into. Vincent Price and Barbara Steele may be the biggest draws, but the
underrated Luana Anders is the unsung heroine of this movie, and her most
unforgettable sequence is a really disturbing prologue Corman created in 1968
so his movie would be long enough to fit into a two-hour TV timeslot.
That’s it for this year’s Diary of the Dead! I’d be lying if
I said that every movie was a classic, but at least we ended with one. Have a
Happy, Horrific Halloween.
